Hi, all,

I recently upgraded from Fedora 9 to Fedora 12 (x86_64 version) and I'm having performance problems with httpd, which is the main purpose for this particular machine.

When I tried to start httpd the first time, I encountered problems with the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file: the modules mod_file_cache.so and mod_mem_cache.so appeared to be missing from the new OS, so I commented out those lines from my previous version of httpd.conf.

Now, when I check the status of httpd, I get the following:

[root@localhost]# service httpd status
httpd dead but subsys locked

I'm not sure what that means. Apache does seem to be running, and queries from outside to my web site are serviced normally most of the time. If I query active processes, I see 12 instances of httpd running:

[root@localhost]# ps -ef | grep httpd
root 1465 1 0 10:04 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache 1509 1465 0 10:05 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache 1511 1465 0 10:05 ? 00:00:01 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache 2325 1465 0 10:16 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
...

Notice the first entry is assigned to root? That's odd... not sure I've ever seen that before.

At any rate, I've noticed some pretty odd behavior out of the web site: just this morning, the machine performance went to hell. I checked "top" -- it took about 90 seconds for the terminal window to respond, and then refresh time, which is supposed to be around 2 seconds, took more like 30 seconds to a minute. There was no single process eating the cpu, but the httpd processes were sitting at the top, along with a single mysqld process. This condition lasted at least 10 minutes, and then I manually rebooted the machine (e.g. hit the Big Red Switch.)

I suspect this is all related.

Any ideas where I should check?

Thanks for your help in advance.

Phil Weingart

One more thing...

I'd like to reduce the number of processes httpd spawns. When people hit my server, it seems to generate a whole bunch of httpd processes, like 20 or 25. I think there's a parameter in httpd.conf that controls that, but I don't recall which. Can anybody suggest normal settings for httpd.conf that will tame this process-spawning? Thanks.

PW

did you do a FULL reinstall ?
Installing fedora 12 on a freshly formatted drive ?
if not and you managed to run "upgrade"
the upgrade did not work.

Yes, I did a full reinstall, and formatted the drive.

However, I restored some elements from the previous install, and one of those was httpd.conf. Is there a reason why the previous httpd.conf configuration should not work on the new version?